


Crashing.

by skeletonwrites



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 18:54:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17883389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeletonwrites/pseuds/skeletonwrites
Summary: Jude Duarte navigates life as the daughter of Secretary of Defense, and struggles daily with her hatred of Cardan Greenbriar, son of the President of the United States.My Tumblr!





	Crashing.

Jude Duarte sat, head down, scribbling into her notebook with a blood red fountain pen. Two highlighters – green and yellow – were resting against the side of spiral, lids off so she was able to easily highlight important bits she may find useful later. The margins of her biology book were lined with her notes, different bits color coded according to a system she had come up with to keep her notes easy to skim through.

She was alone at her lab table, waiting for class to start. Jude was always early to class, perched in her chair ten minutes before the professor even bothered to show up, twenty minutes before students would begin to filter in and find their seats. She used the extra time to review her course work and notes to prepare for class in order to be at the top of her game. Unlike some people, she took college extremely seriously.

She was still skimming her textbook when the teacher called attention to the class, and Jude finally looked up from the pages, capping her highlighters and turning her gaze upon the professor. Jude truly enjoyed biology, every little bit of it. She was never bored, and she was beyond excited for the next six weeks as they would be studying anatomy and dissecting different animals, and her high school had never had dissection in the course work. Better still, everyone was already in class and she was alone at her table, so she didn’t have to deal with any lab partners.

As the professor began the lesson, the slides appeared on screen, and Jude immediately took to filling in the blanks on the study guide as the low but lilting voice of the professor filled the room. Near the back of the class, her twin sister, Taryn, sat with her fiancé Locke. It annoyed Jude to no end, because Taryn wasn’t fully focused on her studies when she sat near the fool. She particularly couldn’t stand Locke because for whatever reason, freshman year he had tried to court both Jude and Taryn, keeping Jude completely in the dark but ensuring Taryn that it was necessary for one reason or another. It was sketchy, it was gross, but Locke was from a wealthy family, his father a congressman, and Taryn believed she loved him. At the thought, Jude rolled her brown eyes and leaned back in her chair, having finished copying the notes from the slide and focused her attention on the professor.

A solid twenty minutes into class, the door banged open. A tall, lean and devastatingly beautiful man walked in, the curls of his raven hair falling into his eyes as he shot a sheepish grin in Locke’s direction. Jude’s lips immediately turned up in disgust. If there was anyone she hated, it would be Cardan Greenbriar, son of the President of the United States of America, and a complete asshole.

“So nice of you to join us, Mr. Greenbriar. Please take a seat with-“ his eyes scanned the room, and so did Jude’s, because it dawned on her as he looked for an empty chair that the only empty chair was the one to her left. “Miss Duarte.” Her heart sank and her stomach became a lump in her throat all at once. Cardan looked as pleased about the situation as she did, dropping his bag onto the ground aggressively and sinking down into the chair next to her. His scent washed over her, a clean and alluring scent she hated that she would think about later.

Jude risked a glance over at him, quickly taking in his wardrobe and his stupid, beautiful face. He wore something similar to what she wore – black jeans with holes in the knees, a plain white t-shirt with a loose French tuck into the waist – and a black leather jacket. The boots he wore had silver gleaming at the toe, he wore them almost constantly, clearly a favorite of his. She hated that she knew that. The sharp edges of his jaw and cheekbones seemed more pronounced by how he appeared to be clenching down, a feathering of the muscle prominent as he glanced her direction. Jude turned her head to avoid making contact with him glassy black eyes, her hair spilling down over her shoulder. When she felt his gaze on her for too long, her nostrils flared slightly as she tilted her head to look at him with arched brows.

“What?” She hissed quietly, filling in the blanks on a new page of her study guide. Cardan’s eyes glitter and narrow before he looks away, that muscle in his jaw feathering with irritation. He was the son of the President. People didn’t talk to him like that. Cardan Greenbriar gets everything he wants, when he wants it, because his father is the leader of the free world. Nothing irritated Jude more than the way he and most of his friends got handouts while Jude had worked hard for everything she’d ever received.

Although her step-father, of sorts, was the Secretary of Defense and was the President’s right hand when it came to any and all military action, she’d had to prove herself time and time again. Taryn may have been content to hardly be recognize for her accomplishments, Jude loathed it. Jude longed to be in a position of power, to be the first female president, to have her brilliance acknowledged. She deserved it. Cardan Greenbriar didn’t deserve the constant ass-kissing, the handouts. He was an asshole. He deserved to be treated like an asshole, so she always had treated him as such, despite occasional warnings from his secret service to mind the way she spoke to him.

As class went on, Cardan seemed to get more and more annoyed with Jude the more she raised her hand and gave a correct answer, and they were all correct answers. He didn’t bother to hide his sneer of disgust when she appeared eager for class that would come on Wednesday, when they would begin dissections, and he definitely didn’t bother hiding the grunt of irritation when the professor declared that the person next to them would be their lab partner for the next six weeks. Jude didn’t hide the flare of her nostrils, or the anxious rubbing of her ring finger, either. Soon after the declaration, class was dismissed, and as she began shoving her belongings into her bag, she shot Cardan a venom filled glare.

“Don’t fuck this up for me,” she sneered, throwing her backpack over her should and leaving him at the table, staring at steepled fingers.

-

 

The first day for dissection was Friday. Class on Wednesday had been mostly uneventful. Cardan has been late as usual, which annoyed Jude to no end. They had gone over the rules and instructions for dissection in depth, and by the time class rolled around on Friday, Jude felt confident in her ability to dissect their first subject: a frog.

As always, Jude was early, reviewing her notes to make sure she was completely prepared. She made small talk with the professor, asking questions occasionally to clarify certain instructions. She was excited, to say the least, until she remembered that Cardan was her partner, and that something was likely to go wrong. She was shaken from her thoughts when a body dropped heavily into the seat next to her, and startled, she glanced up to find Cardan, lab coat and all, one of the first students to filter in. Her shock was written all over her face evidently, because he turned to her with slightly raised brows.

“Don’t look so surprised. You’ve threatened me every time you’ve seen me this week,” he turned in his chair to face her. “Did you know I had to tell my secret service you weren’t a true threat?”

“That was stupid of you. Did you know I was a world champion last year in fencing?”

“Fencing hardly makes you a threat. I’d love to see you behead me with a foil,” he shot back, the arch of his brow somehow making his facial features sharper. Definitely sharper than her fencing foil.

“Jokes on you, I can handle a proper rapier with just as much skill and ease. Maybe I couldn’t behead you, but I could get stabby if I felt like it,” she mused, narrowing her eyes at him for a moment before turning to face the front as the professor stepped up to his podium, droning out instructions for the dissections.  
Jude had a hard time focusing on his words, because Cardan was still staring at her. She could practically feel the way his eyes ran over her cheeks, her mouth, down her arms to her hands. A flush worked its way up from the collar of her lab coat, standing out harshly next to the bright white. Her fingers balled into tight fists as she tried to ignore his gaze. Gods, she hated Cardan Greenbriar. She hated how he got under her skin, she hated how he bantered with her. But none of that amounted to how much she hated that he was possibly the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, with his bone structure that would cut her palms if she held his face.

“What?” She turned her gaze to him as his eyes landed on hers, black glass boring into the soft brown of willow bark.

“You want to stab me?” Jude huffed a laugh at his remark, eyes grazing over her textbook.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” At that, Cardan braced his elbows on the table and pressed his lips into a thin line. Jude made her way to the front of the room shortly after to gather their frog and brought it back to the table. After slipping on gloves, she removed the frog from the container and arranged the station so their tools were laid out, easily accessible next to their subject. Jude pulled her safety goggles on and glanced over at Cardan, who now wore gloves and goggles just as she did, verifying he was ready to begin. Without saying anything else, she picked up the scissors, only to have them plucked out of her hands by the man sitting next to her. Jude shot him an incredulous look.

“I think I’ll be handling the sharp objects, seeing as one of us appears to have murderous tendencies and it’s not me,” he drawled, making the first clipping of the skin to cut up the frog’s belly. His fingers were quick and nimble as he clipped the skin under the frogs arms and legs. Jude picked up a pin, prepared to pin the frog’s skin back, only for Cardan to shoot her a sharp look as though she were a child in trouble.

“I have to do something, if you’re not going to let me do any cutting,” she hissed, pulling the skin back and pinning it down to the material of the tray. As soon as all of the organs were exposed, they each picked up a tool to push the organs around to properly take notes on their dissection. They worked quietly for the most part, somehow keeping their bickering to a minimum as they pushed around organs, noting the fat bodies, the spleen, the gallbladder of the frog. It was interesting to Jude to see how similar the anatomy was to that of a human, and the entire inside of the frog was as green as it’s skin.

“The heart,” Jude murmured under her breath, noting the ventricles on the diagram they were to be labeling.

“I’m surprised you’d recognize such a thing.”

“Excuse me?”

“I assumed you had to have a heart to identify one,” Cardan said smoothly, jotting down a note about the right ventricle. Jude’s brows rose and eyes narrowed, shooting daggers his direction that he merely ignored.

The dissection went on, their banter going back and forth until they were finally dismissed from class. Cardan stayed in his seat while Jude packed up her backpack, watching her in the intent way that she always seemed to catch him.

“What?” She said flatly, hooking her bag up over her shoulder. Cardan rose from his chair, slinging his bag onto his back.

“Are you coming to my party tonight?” He inquired, a brow raised inquisitorially. Jude face contorted into that of mixed boredom and disgust, a look of pure incredulousness.

“Why would I come to your party?”

“Your sister would be there, I just assumed that you would be in tow as well.”

“Just because we’re twins doesn’t mean we do everything together. Example: She likes to fornicate with dumbasses and lowlives like Locke, and I like to enjoy my free time away from the likes of you,” she crooned, pushing past him, once again leaving Cardan staring after her like she was a puzzle that he was intent to solve.

-

“They’re not so bad, Jude,” Taryn insisted as she twisted and turned in front of the full length mirror, taking in her appearance. Jude watched from Taryn’s bed, legs crossed at the angles. She turned her attention back to her phone, hardly paying attention, but found it in her to sigh.

“You do remember the time that Cardan pushed me into Alligator Lake right?”

“There haven’t been alligators in that lake in a decade,” Taryn pointed out, but Jude still rolled her eyes.

“Yet if there had been, I would have been dinner! And he would have left me there to die.”

“If there were alligators in there, he wouldn’t have done it at all,” insisted Taryn, turning to look at Jude. “Just come tonight. It’ll be fun, and you can drink a little and stop being so uptight for like, five seconds.”

“I have better things to do than torture myself at a frat party with Cardan Greenbriar.” Taryn sighed, bending down to pull on her shoes. Jude turned slipped off of Taryn’s bed and into the main room of their apartment, where their oldest sister sat on the floor before her girlfriend in an outfit that screamed ‘going out’ while Heather braided her hair. “Date night?”

“Greenbriar party,” Vivi said, popping a piece of gum into her mouth. Jude clenched her jaw.

“Not you, too,” she groaned, and Heather shot her a sympathetic glance. Before anyone could say anything else to Jude, she disappeared into her room, shutting the door and flopping on her bed. As she scrolled through Snapchat and instagram, she saw several check-ins at Cardan’s house, even more snaps from the party that had it’s own filter for crying out loud. The secret service had to hate that. How many extravagant parties he threw, how many people they’d have to keep an eye on to make sure nobody tried to assassinate the President’s youngest son. Cardan was constantly visible, if not by his own doing then by someone else’s.

A snap from a kid in their chemistry class had Jude annoyed beyond belief, because behind the boy that took the selfie, Cardan’s head was lowered to Nicasia’s ear, and it being a photo, she couldn’t really tell what he was doing so close to her. In the past, they had dated, but she had broken up with him last year for Locke, who in turn left Nicasia for Taryn. Perhaps they were rekindling a flame.

She dropped her phone, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose to soothe the oncoming headache that so often accompanied thoughts of Cardan. She could still smell his crisp and clean, but musky sandalwood scent as he dropped into the seat next to her. She could see his long and nimble fingers cutting the skin of that frog, holding his pen as it glided across the paper. Her eyes snapped open when she started thinking about the curl of his hair, the sparkling black onyx of his eyes.

“Damn me to hell,” she groaned as she rolled out of bed, sifting through her closet for something to wear to Cardan Greenbriar’s stupid fucking party. 

**Author's Note:**

> LMK what you guys think! Find more content on my tumblr @highqueenofelfhame.
> 
> [My Tumblr!](http://Www.highqueenofelfhame.tumblr.com)


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